It is often challenging to be able to motivate and inspire people to perform an activity. For example, most organizations and companies that have employees seek to improve the means by which they motivate and inspire employees to perform their employment duties. Despite enormous amounts of research into this field of study, the subject of employee motivation is still not clearly understood and is often very poorly practiced.
As a result, employee engagement has been, and continues to be, a major issue to industry. Bored or disengaged employees represent a huge productivity cost to most companies and organizations. Incentive programs and rewards work as external motivation, but do not typically increase long-term motivation and productivity.
These problems are not limited to the employee/employment context, but similarly exist for any context in which it is desirable or necessary to motivate individuals, groups, and/or organizations. For example, the educational context is another common scenario in which there would be great value in having improved techniques for inspiring and creating higher levels of motivation.
Gamification is one approach that can be taken to create and enhance engagement of individuals and groups. Gamification refers to the application of game mechanics to engage users and to solve problems.
For example, many online sites utilize gamification concepts to enhance user experiences, often with the goal of enticing users to continue to visit the online sites on a more frequent basis and for longer durations of time. In a similar way, many software applications have been modified to include gamification concepts to enhance user interactions with the software application. Gamification tools and toolkits are now available that allow one to customize applications to include such gamification concepts and mechanisms.
The problem is that these prior approaches all require customized modifications to create specifically tailored applications that include the gamification concepts. Even with the availability of gamification toolkits, such customized programming and developments necessarily require significant amounts of investments in cost, time, and expertise to end up with a properly constructed and correctly operating application that includes the requisite game components—which is an endeavor that is more costly than is worthwhile for many applications that could nevertheless benefit from gamification concepts. Moreover, these customized applications include gamification mechanisms that are solely dedicated to, and limited in their usefulness for, the specific purposes for which the customized applications are directed.
As is evident, there is a great need for improved techniques to generally address the above-described problems relating to motivations of individuals, such as employee motivations. There is also a need for improved approaches to implement gamification concepts.